Hip-Hop Stream Totals Increase to 25 Percent of U.S. Streams in 2018

2018 was a major year for hip-hop as a genre. In fact, more people in the U.S. streamed rap music from Drake, Nicki Minaj and more diverse artists from their preferred music streaming services than ever before.

According to a report from Buzz Angle (Jan. 3), hip-hop made up 25.4 percent of all music streamed across audio and video platforms last year. That's a three percent increase from 22.0% in 2017. Music streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify and Pandora report that hip-hop music made up 26.9 percent of all on-demand plays, which is up from last year's total 23.6%. Even in video streaming services like YouTube, hip-hop was responsible for 22.8 percent of music plays in 2018, which is at least three percent more than last year.

The report also dubbed Drake's Scorpion album as their biggest album of 2018. Not only did the album go Platinum on the same day of its release, but also its stand-out song "God's Plan" was the biggest track of the year among all three relevant formats: downloads, audio streams and video streams.

Latinx music as a whole also showed more growth in the U.S. with increased music video streams of 21.8 percent, which up from 20.1 percent in 2017. However, the genre where Bad Bunny and Ozuna excel claimed just 5.8 percent of all on-demand audio streams in 2018.